Economics

Last week the Obama administration began rolling out new campaign titled, we kid you not, “Yes, we did.” Did what exactly? Waste nearly a trillion dollars on an economic stimulus that by every objective measure has completely failed to perform as advertised? Then yes you did. A new CBS poll out today shows that 74 percent of Americans believe the Obama stimulus either damaged the economy or had no effect. Clearly the White House is on a different planet than the rest of the country.

In another dispatch from Planet Obama, the White House Council of Economic Advisers released a report today purporting to prove that President Obama’s stimulus has saved or created 3 million jobs and is on track to meet its goal of 3.5 million jobs by the end of this year. Where do they come up this slop? [Read more…]

5/27/2010 – Chuck Colson –
The evidence shows over and over that crime is not caused by deprivation, but by depravity. And the answer is conversion.

The statistics are startling. Across the United States, crime rates are dropping—for the third year in a row. According to the FBI, violent crimes like murder and rape were down 5.5% in 2009. Property crimes were down 4.9%. Amazingly enough, crime rates dropped more in big cities than in smaller cities.

The media is having a hard time explaining why crime rates are dropping. As one major paper put it, the drop in crime is “challenging the widely held belief that recessions drive up crime rates.” But “challenging” puts it too mildly: Since the economic collapse, the rate of decline in crime rates has actually accelerated!

So where does the “widely held” belief that recessions fuel crime come from? [Read more…]

5/7/2010 – Jacob Hornberger –
Liberals say that they love the poor, needy, and disadvantaged. Unfortunately, however, the economic philosophy that liberals favor constitutes a direct assault on the economic well-being of the poor, along with nearly everyone else in society.

Liberals claim to combat poverty in two principal ways.

First, they use the force of government (e.g., income taxes) to take money from those who have earned it in order to give it to the poor.

Second, they restrict people’s use of their property to enable the poor to have access to such property.[Read more…]

This class of the very poor – those who are just on the borders of pauperism or fairly over the borders – is rapidly growing. Wealth is increasing very fast; poverty, even pauperism, is increasing still more rapidly. – Washington Gladden, Applied Christianity (1886)

For three decades, we have experienced a social engineered inequality that is really a sin – of biblical proportions. We have indeed seen class warfare, but this war has been waged by the wealthy and their political allies against the poor and the middle class. – Jim Wallis, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street (2010)

One of Jim Wallis’ long running aims at Sojourners is to cast himself as a moderate or centrist (God is not a Republican. Or a Democrat). This is howling nonsense to anyone who pays attention to his policy prescriptions or watches the progressive/liberal company he keeps. With his new book, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street (Howard Books, 2010), Wallis drops all pretense to holding the center as he piles on with the horde of religious left activists and others now demonizing Wall Street. [Read more…]

As a system, absolutely not, as for the term itself though, perhaps we should.

In an article in the Telegraph on Thursday 3.04.10, the Chairman of Marks & Spencer, the leading department store in London, made some interesting remarks about capitalism. He spoke mostly about the perception of capitalism and the free market system, in the eyes of people around the world, and the fact that the term itself has begun to become so negative, that they forget the fact that capitalism is the only system which has ever worked, and that every time it was tried, communism led to misery, oppression, and the murder of millions. He even suggested that we find another name for it. Why not ? The progressives found another name for communism, didn’t they? [Read more…]

Imagine a politician announcing: we are going to raise the Social Security age to 66. We are going to freeze and cut spending until we balance the budget within three years, and then with surpluses pay down the debt within 6 years. We are going to build 100 new nuclear power plants and open up the country and its shores to oil and gas production. We are going to cut back all federal entitlements and subsidies by 20% immediately. We are going to ensure enough water for agriculture. We are … [Read more…]

Yet another travesty is unfolding before our eyes in these United States of America. While tens of millions of Americans continue to struggle through difficult economic conditions, with hundreds of thousands more losing their jobs every month, tens of thousands more losing their homes and their businesses, and millions more facing salary cuts and pay freezes, government employees are prospering and getting rewarded financially more than ever.

As the economy struggles, incomes fall, and business bankruptcies and mortgage default rates remain at all time highs, the federal government spending is booming and its employees are enjoying increased hiring and higher salaries. [Read more…]

A new report from the Bureaus of Labor Statistics that was released today, shows that almost 15 million Americans are currently out of work and unable to find jobs. Worse still, those with jobs have not seen their wages increase much in the last 10 years. However, government workers are enjoying a boom in hiring and generous salary increases thanks in large part to very cushy pensions and other benefits.

The pay differential between public sector employees and the private sector shows a troubling trend. Government workers have benefited greatly, even during the severe recession, and their wages now outpace the employee compensation in private industry. According to recent research done by Mark J. Perry, professor of finance and economics at the School of Management of the University of Michigan government employees make on average 45% more than private sector employees. [Read more…]

President Obama’s misbegotten bank tax is precisely the wrong policy at precisely the wrong time. It will wind up backfiring across the board. Why? Because bank consumers and borrowers are the ones who will wind up paying this tax, creating an obstacle to economic recovery.

The economic programs and policies currently in place are truly astounding. I don’t think I have ever seen a more harmful economic environment for the country. While some of these programs started with Bush, the Obama administration has advanced them to insane levels. Logic, economics, common sense, and history must be defied to believe a recovery is possible in this environment. The nation’s standard of living will be substantially lowered without prompt changes in policy. [Read more…]

Does the market inspire people to greater practical virtue, or does it eviscerate what little virtue any of us have?

Far from draining moral goodness out of us—as many think—the free market serves as a “school of the practical virtues.” Rather than elevating greed and self-sufficiency, the market fosters interdependence and cooperation. Its rewards do not go to those who are the most isolated, self-absorbed, or cut off from society, but to those who sustain mutually prosperous relationships with others. [Read more…]

There is one scene in Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story where its writer, director, hero and sole credited actor is examining the copy of the Constitution that is on display in the National Archives. He asks a guard — this is the kind of thing Mr. Moore routinely does for effect, pretending he doesn’t know that the guards are not constitutional experts — where in the document before him there is any mention of free markets, free enterprise or capitalism. He can’t seem to find those words. Could it be that they’re not there? And, if they’re not, does that mean that they’re not constitutionally protected? Not, of course, that one could imagine its mattering to him if they were. But without a specific mention, presumably, we must suppose that these “evil” things — he has the testimony of two lefty priests and a bishop to that effect — must have been snuck into America’s constitutional arrangements at a later date by, well, capitalists — or other, equally unscrupulous sorts. [Read more…]

Religious left icon Jim Wallis has popularized the maxim, “budgets are moral documents.” Yet the often repeated declaration is true in a way Wallis hasn’t envisioned, signaling bad news for Washington’s big spenders and those stuck footing the bill. Currently this country is facing no greater crisis than out of control spending and a mounting federal debt—a moral problem of prodigious proportions.

The Office of Management and Budget is projecting $9 trillion in deficits over the next ten years. Washington’s leaders have long paid lip service to the crisis, but their actions betray their words. [Read more…]

Environmentalist dreams are starting to rub Americans raw. Greenpeace has turned its attention to an issue that invites both the reporter and readers to make them the butt of jokes, but which is no laughing matter in the end. They are dumping on the manufacture of plush toilet paper on the grounds that it helps destroy the environment. [Read more…]

“Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil… you have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people,” concludes Michael Moore in his latest documentary Capitalism: A Love Story.

Moore’s fulmination is neither surprising nor atypical in this era when capitalism finds itself under all-out assault. Having become something of a derogatory term, capitalism gets faulted for almost every societal problem and ill. Blamed for exploitation, poverty, fraud, alienation, crime, racism and nearly everything else, capitalism is increasingly cast as the great villain of our time. [Read more…]